Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday February 18, 2011 @03:57PM
from the free-watson-from-the-bonds-of-earth dept.

jbrodkin writes "IPv6 is here, but what's up with IPv7? Nothing, says Vint Cerf. While one day there may be another new Internet Protocol, work is not happening on it now. 'At the moment there doesn't seem to be any incentive for inventing yet another one,' he said in an interview. However, he contends that 2011 will be a Big Year for his pet project, the extraterrestrial 'InterPlanetary Internet.' The 'Bundle' network protocols will be tested in space and standardized to 'make them available to all the space-faring countries.' As they are used with more spacecraft, 'we can literally grow an interplanetary network that can support both man and robotic exploration.'"

IPv6 is not mainstream yet, and probably still won't be for a while longer. Considering that IPv6 solves the problem of limited addresses in an increasingly networked world, which was and still is the driving force for the migration from IPv4, immediate R&D into the next standard just seems unnecessary. Plus, with how big of a headache IPv6 has been, who can honestly blame 'em for not wanting to think about it for a while.

You are forgetting that ST Voyager moved a long distance, many quadrants, in just an instant after leaving deep space nine. This is the foundation of the show. In ST, they do not understand everything yet...

Yeah, by the caretaker. Standard starfleet subspace could not send a message from the delta to the Alpha/Beta Quadrant in less than 70 years if I recall correctly. You should have added a bit about subspace channels through micro-wormholes, which is how voyager was able to communicate with the alpha quadrant in the latter years of the show.

Nah, it wasn't in the latter years of the show, it was in season 1, maybe season 2 disk 1. I just started to watch all episodes lately and I am at season 2 disk 2 right now and they already have contacted the alien scientist in the alpha quadrant. I am pretty sure it was in season 1. The scientist was talking to them from the past, he promised to deliver their message home in the future but Voyager records showed that he died before he could.

Season 4 on I think.... though feel free to revoke my geek card if I'm off by a few episodes.... I've been watching other stuff lately, not much time for trek these days when I could be watching Doctor Who....

They precisely one quadrant over. There's only four: Alpha Quadrant, Beta Quadrant, Delta Quandrant, and Gamma Quadrant. (You know, "quad" means four?). It's pretty much one fourth of the galaxy sliced in four equidistant places for some arbitrary reason for all I know.

Some are hoping for a magical IPv7 that would magically 'just work' with IPv4 without any messy backwards compatible issues. None of those understand the problem, but assume there must have been *some* way to do it without losing our quad-dotted addresses or rewriting or recompiling a single thing. Like 'why not just raise the limit on the numbers from 255 to a thousand or something?' or 'just add another dot-number at the end'.

Something with extensible addressing would have been nice, like phone numbers with international area code / national area code / local number, but with an open ended number of divisions. You could refer to stuff on your lan with a single number, possibly within your corporate network with 2 numbers, and so on. When we need to start routing traffic off the planet just prefix another number on there - 1 for Earth, 2 for Mars, etc. A full address might take the form of:

It sounds like a lot of processing to me... not the kind that would swamp your PC while connecting to emule, but one that could be harmful to the backbone routers.

Maybe. I was kind of thinking the opposite though... the address tables would be much smaller than IPv4 because you only need to route between levels, and you could do that in hardware by examining the first few bytes of the address. IPv6 has much the same idea but with a fixed length address.

Simple: IPV6, while having more then "sufficient" address space, was poorly conceived, tries to do stuff it doesn't need to and lacks standardization of key items, such as the transition from legacy (IPV4) protocols. I for one would LOVE to see a more elegant, more complete solution that would allow us to quickly implement it and bypass the nightmare that is IPV6. It doesn't need to offer more address space, just implement that space in a way that makes it and the translation to it easy to understand and

In his novel A Fire Upon the Deep [amazon.com], Vernor Vinge's vision of a galactic internet was basically Usenet newsgroups writ large. Once the web took off, he got a lot of flak for that seemingly outdated vision, but perhaps he's right. As easy as real-time communication is nowadays to people around the globe, once the internet moves into space, the incredible latency of long-distance communications could return us to a series of groups and threads that one logs into periodically, downloads en masse, and reads locally.

As easy as real-time communication is nowadays to people around the globe, once the internet moves into space, the incredible latency of long-distance communications could return us to a series of groups and threads that one logs into periodically, downloads en masse, and reads locally.

Of course given the time delays between solar systems, you could start a flame war that your great-great-grandchildren would have to finish.

you could start a flame war that your great-great-grandchildren would have to finish

Oh that still happens now... metaphorically. Hell if religion was a flame war, that is, then [(great-)^N]great-grandchildrenN is an element of {n | n an element of Z+}, our era, is still continuing it!

Anything adapted for seriously high latency will probably look a lot more like today's broadcast media: If your ping times are measured in years, waiting for an ack from the remote host, or asking for a corrupt packet to be re-sent are going to be somewhere between painful and useless. As with broadcast, the sender will just have to generate a signal that the receiver can reconstruct without further communication, and pack

Usenet and the underlying UUCP protocol were designed around propagation times measured in hours to days. They'll work just fine inside the solar system, while the problems with interstellar use stem from the social expectations layered on top of it rather than from the technology itself.

I am sending out pings such as this. I am expending enormous resources to do this, let me tell you — but it is that important. I've beamed direct at all the hub sites that are in range to the spinward of me. No replies.
More ominous: I have tried to transmit "over the top", that is by using known sites in the Transcend that are above the catastrophe. Most such would not normally respond, Powers being what they are. But I received no replies. A silence like the Depths is there. It appears that a porti

You forgot to mention that the transmit and receive devices in his books were the size of Jupiter, had a transmission speed of a few meg a second for the whole solar system but could transmit information faster than the speed of light. It was instantaneous transmission of information but had very limited bandwidth. As a result, it was a lot like Usenets from the 80s.

Within the solar system, you're talking probably an hour at most (round-trip, unless we colonize Jupiter or something). So yea, instant communication is out, but it's still fairly quick. You could post to slashdot and have your comments appear while the story is still on the front page. I'd imagine popular content will be mirrored by service providers, unpopular content will need to be requested - provider pulls it into the mirror, drops it a while later - for the user, they try to load it, get a page sayin

Why would there be temperature swings? The sun doesn't have a dark side and you wouldn't want a communications platform to turn very quickly anyway or be near anything else that could block line of sight to it. Just put a sunshade on one side of the platform that can withstand high temperatures -- 450C is no hotter than my soldering iron -- or am I missing something?

Why is putting a platform on or orbiting Mercury useful? It's not inhabited and it isn't always in the right place around the sun, sometimes it's going to be behind (or in front of) the sun at the same time as the thing you're trying to communicate with. You'd need a constellation of sun-orbiting satellites so there was always at least one in the right relative position.

Is it that you want the satellites near a magnetosphere? That kind of almost makes sense.

I was referring to your point about temperature swings and the dark side. Tidal locking and all that.

As to it not working when Mercury is in (or close to) conjunction with Earth and/or Mars, a fair point - but not mentioned in my reply or your previous post, so completely irrelevant to your rant.

Finally, I never advocated putting the station on Mercury - a far more sensible choice would be to put a satellite in an orbit out of the ecliptic - I just pointed out why your snide remark about temperature swing

Except Anonymous didn't actually suggest putting the relay on Mercury, they suggested putting it in an orbit near Mercury's. I was hoping you had a reason for assuming the relay would be on Mercury besides failure of reading comprehension, but I guess not.

"One thing led to another â¦ soon I was pondering a comm network that functioned across the light-years. And, we homo saps being a tad competitiveâ"about interstellar cyber attacks..... Herewith, a few of Lerner

Delay / Disruption Tolerant Internet (DTN) is still at the Research Group [irtf.org] stage. It's really more about replacing TCP than the Internet (UDP will work just fine in space), and has received some criticism [google.com] (pdf download), ironically mostly centered around how it breaks the end-to-end principle.

While there is now an SIS-DTN green book [ccsds.org] (a necessary step for general deployment on space missions), and initial tests in space are positive [intersys-lab.org], these things move so slowly that I think it's going to be a while before this is generally deployed in space.

Of course there is incentive to work on the next generation of protocols. It's basic R&D and a drive to not sit on your laurels.

This is not about merely having more addresses, but also in dealing with issues like dual or multi-homed routing (last I heard IPv6 dual-homing was still in progress.)

When comparing the pace of innovation in other areas, the glacial pace of IPv4 to IPv6 is actually kind of disturbing. The fact that there is no work going on for developing what might be next is even more so.

I'll also add two comments concerning stagnation of technology. 1) MAC Addresses haven't changed in a long time. Yet Ethernet continues to advance, from coax to twisted pair, wireless, and fiber and from a bus to hubs then switches and now L3 switches. (although where are my end-to-end Jumbo Frames already?). A capable foundation does not hinder innovation. 2) Globally unique addresses in applications are the key. Returning the Internet to its mid-90s

You seem to miss my point. It is not about everyone having their own IP address. (Which is really kind of silly when you think about it. We have a broken system where IP address == reachability.) It's about continuing R&D and innovation. Saying "Oh, well, this is good enough! Let's stop thinking." is not a great position.

I do not care if there are enough IPv6 addresses to last until the end of the universe. The address space is not the issue.

I do not miss your point, I make mine that R&D advances best with a common capable foundation. Ethernet addressing is static, yet Ethernet interfaces advance. IPv4 has been static since RFC1918, yet applications on it have evolved. People will find new uses for multicast and peer-to-peer communications in IPv6. The methods behind DNS haven't changed much since the end of the global hosts file, yet new record types like SRV, AAAA, and RRSIG can arise because of the sublime framework that underlies name r

Remaining against IPv4 may be against both our interests and while adopting IPv6 may be in your (commercial) interest, it is against my long term interest because I wish to continue to see the networking technologies evolve. If everyone moves into an IPv6 network and continues to be fixated on having their own IPv6 address (and continuing to embed them into protocols (like SIP, bleah)), then it will be even harder to move on to new technologies.

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We are now ready to transfer the fund intergalactically and that is where you come in. It is important to inform you that as civil servants, we are forbidden to operate a foreign account; that is why we require your assistance. The total sum will be shared as follows: 70% for us, 25% for you and 5% for local and international expenses incidental to the transfer.

The transfer is risk free on both sides. I am an accountant with the Spaceball Galactic Energy Corporation (SGEC). If you find this proposal acceptable, we shall require the following documents:

Alternatively we will furnish you with the text of what to type into your letter-headed paper, along with a breakdown explaining, comprehensively what we require of you. The business will take us thirty (30) Spaceball days to accomplish.

With IPv6 extension headers, it's entirely possible to, without requiring a whole new protocol, create an extended form of IP address... perhaps using the extension header to contain routing information to send the packet outside of the origin solar system, and using the normal 128 bits for all local traffic.

/** [...] Note that 120 sec is defined in the protocol as the maximum* possible RTT. I guess we'll have to use something other than TCP* to talk to the University of Mars.* PAWS allows us longer timeouts and large windows, so once implemented* ftp to mars will work nicely.*/

Humans have demonstrated time and time and time again, that they are lazy and reactionary for the most part.The transition to ipv6 is going to be absolutely huge, I'm sure everyone here doesn't need to be told about the complexities of it.

As far as I'm concerned and I feel I'm probably right, once we go to ipv6, we won't see another protocol implemented in our lifetimes (I'm in my early 30's) period, nada - not gonna happen.The bigger the internet becomes, the older it becomes and the more devices attached, the more difficult changing the protocol is. It's already going to be a nightmare, don't expect this will get easier.This is like one day telling all Americans "Sorry, no more 110v - we're moving to 240v power" - it's a pretty monumental task.

So to get to my point, if ipv6 doesn't do what we need or would 'like' it to do, sorry to say but tough shit, someone should have thought of that earlier, because it's going to be here to stay... - of course if you want to see a somewhat faster transition to ipvXX? then just wait until we are completely out of ipv6 addresses, we will then likely transition quicker... I'm sure they won't last long!

This is like one day telling all Americans "Sorry, no more 110v - we're moving to 240v power"

Most North American households can already do 240 volt, 60 hertz electricity. If you look in the back of a residential electrical panel you'll generally see two bus bars. If you take a voltage reading between those bus bars (make sure the multimeter is set on volts and not amps or you'll smoke your leads) you'll get somewhere between 220-240 volts, depending on your distance from the utility transformer and various other factors. We've got, for the most part, three wires going to every outlet (lighting or r

Speaking about Sir Tim Berners-Lee's project for 'semantic web', now called 'deep linking':

My impression is that it's a tough slog, and it's been going for about a decade now. But Tim's been successful in the past, so I would not rule this out as a potential positive outcome, but it's a long haul.

Yes, I suppose inventing HTTP might qualify as a 'past success.'

Obviously it's a joke - Cerf himself has had some successes, or at least un-failures, himself, I hear.